Officially, the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction is an annual $25,000 cash prize given to a writer for a single work of imaginative fiction. This award is intended to recognize those writers Ursula spoke of in her 2014 National Book Awards speech—realists of a larger reality, who can imagine real grounds for hope and see alternatives to how we live now.

Practically, it's a TBR for those of us who read sci-fi with purpose, with intent, with a critical reading eye looking for "the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope." (-a quote from Ursula herself)

So without further ado, here's the shortlist for this year.

Audition by Pip Adam (Coffee House Press, June 10, 2025)

Three rom-com quoting MCs travel from incarceration to exile to a place beyond punishment. Audition explores carceral politics and the psychology of violence, and what healing from the harm of those systems might require in a world where embodiment and identity have lost all familiar forms.

Sunward by William Alexander (Saga Press. Sept 16, 2025)

What if robots needed to be raised? Weaving comedy with a vision of parental care that encompasses beings built as well as born, Alexander considers caretaking and community alongside power and resistance. In his future, another way of living is possible—though getting to it is never easy.

Call and Response by Christopher Caldwell (Neon Hemlock, Oct 14, 2025)

Caldwell's speculative and fantastical stories are grounded in the realities, dreams, struggles, and relationships that animate queer lives. Each tale takes seriously the interconnections of class, race, geography, gender, and sexuality—while making striking imaginative leaps into history, the present, and the future.

Midnight Timetable by Bora Chung, translated by Anton Hur (Algonquin, Sept 4, 2025)

This novel in ghost stories, with its haunted shoes and sheep and cats, gently suggests the degree to which humanity’s efforts to control the world are themselves figments and fantasies. Chung’s deep understanding of haunting—and of hierarchies, class, and gender—reminds us that we are a society haunted by its own cruelty, and, crucially, that we have other options.

The Works of Vermin by Hiron Ennes (Tor Books, Oct 14, 2025)

This story of revolution takes place in a city riddled with strange vermin, their exterminators, and a wealthy ruling class who are all but inescapable. Ennes's novel explores resistance, repression, cycles of violence, and the way art and culture are the materials of social change—but can also be key to the consolidation of power.

Notes from a Regicide by Isaac Fellman (Tor Books, April 15, 2025)

Notes from a Regicide is a multilayered, intimate history of two generations of trans characters in the distant (but strangely familiar) future. As Griffon Keming tries to understand his deceased and beloved second parents, Fellman’s narrative twines around art, revolution, disability, love, history, and the specific, often physical, cost of every kind of change.

Mad Sisters of Esi by Tashan Mehta (DAW Books, Sept 9, 2023)

Using myth, fictional scholarship, alchemy, folktales, and animism, Mehta creates a quantum form of storytelling that follows the relationship between two sets of sisters, generations and worlds apart. Mad Sisters of Esi builds upon itself, layer by rich narrative layer, weaving together an all-encompassing saga of grief, love, legacy, and creation.

One Message Remains by Premee Mohamed (Psychopomp, Feb 11, 2025)

In four loosely connected tales, Mohamed explores the way people—soldiers and civilians, bureaucrats and gallows-builders—live during wartime, occupation, and colonization. In one story, ghostly soldiers fight the destruction of their traditions; in another, a young woman finds resistance in the practice of her craft.

Slow Gods by Claire North (Orbit, Nov 18, 2025)

Admittedly the only one I've even heard of and read, this galaxy-spanning space opera explores the fraught, connected roles of power and love as a series of worlds face destruction. Through the perspective of Maw, who was once human but is now something else, capitalism, collective choice, fascism, gender, freedom, the necessity of art collide with the question of how we decide what—and who—matters.